Whoever wrote this can’t count; 45% of those who voted Yes in the Referendum does not equal 45% of the Scottish people or even the registered electorate; you just can’t presume to know the opinion of those who couldn’t, or couldn’t care, to vote.

I have to say it lost me right at the start with ‘this vow is eternal’: nothing is eternal!

It’s too long and confused in both thought and expression, and the language is a curious mixture of grandiose phrases and bureaucratic terms. It’s both attempting to be both universal and specific at the same time, and doesn’t really work I’m afraid. Please does anyone know whether local RIC groups were involved in writing it? It would be good if many people could participate in compiling and and crafting a people’s vow rather than it being the work of one individual.

It would also be nice to have transcripts to accompany videos especially as this vow includes a commitment being non-discriminatory. So here’s the text for anyone who cannot watch or listen to the video:

We, the Radical Independence Convention, hereby make a vow in reply on behalf of the disappointed, the disaffected, the impoverished and the frightened.

The People’s Vow

This vow is eternal and will be honored for so long as we and the generations which follow us and the generation which follow them have breath in our lungs to do so.

We know that the Referendum has changed Scotland utterly. For perhaps the first time in their lives, the majority of working class people felt empowered to take politics into their own hands, standing up to a British state which has become unaccountable and corrupt beyond repair – staring without blinking into the eyes of those who had shown them only contempt. The No vote was concentrated among the wealthy; this is significant.

As democrats we recognise the result of the Referendum but acknowledge the collusion from all sides of the British establishment to deceive and intimidate the Scottish electorate into voting in a way that maintained their right to rule. It was ever thus but not how it need remain.

Despite the immensity of this pressure from above, 45% of the people of Scotland are alive, engaged, hungry for ideas on how to transform this country; they refuse to go back to sleep.

This vow honours not only them but the growing numbers who recognize that independence from Westminster is the best way it can protect its most vulnerable citizens, can enable working people to control their own economy, can inspire fellow workers across the British Isles, Europe and the world to take up a struggle against their own masters. The street cleaner, the nurse and the teacher are the oxygen in society’s blood flow from which the plutocrat draws like a syringe.

We vow to multiply the dreaming power of the ordinary Scottish citizen and magnify their might. In that sense we are not the 45% but the 99%.

We vow to end the austerity which has become the creed of the London elite. To solve a crises created by the rich, they say the public must suffer; we reject this crusade against the poor, both its inefficiency and its immorality.. They have the money but we have the numbers.

We vow to renationalize and retain in public hands those industries which are in the common good. Privatisation, a reduction of the necessities of human life, to cold profit, is a handshake from the undead.

We vow to establish green and sustainable energy; he planet is not the plaything of those who exist in the present and is the host for our species and millions of other species which make life on earth possible.

We will endanger neither the health of our citizens nor the infinite beauty of the natural world. There exists a fragile ecosystem, stretching from the child whose lungs are threatened by pollution to the basking shark giving poetry to our shores.

We vow to establish a republic; the monarchy is an affront to modern democracy, a feudal relic. How can we call ourselves free when we pay fealty to one family, a family that owns vast tracts of land, which rubberstamps our laws, to whom we must ask permission to form a government, and whose head ‘purred’ when she discovered our freedom had been denied.

We vow an opposition to discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability or sexuality.

We are community of citizens, human beings and participants in our right to define ourselves rather then be defined. We are a society proud of our multiculturalism.

Scotland is our hone and we fight for it’s sovereignty but we vow to be internationalists. We are opposed to war in which common people are compelled by their rulers to kill each other, and imperialist entities like NATO. We especially condemn the all-consuming horror of the nuclear threat. We must judge a society on its compassion and it’s solidarity not on its power to invade or annihilate.

We are radical independents only because an immoral vacuum has occupied the centre ground. The forces of oppression present war mongering and corporate theft as a law of nature.

What we propose it not radicalism; it is the basic normality and decency under which any human being should expect to live.

This is the people’s vow and for this we stand.

Before the Referendum we said that Britain is for the rich and that Scotland could be ours. We said anther Scotland is possible. Both are as true now as they were then. We are ready to fight for this future. So to everyone in Scotland and the world beyond this room, join us and imagine.

Have to agree with you. It’s way over the top to make an “eternal” vow and a bit arrogant to assume that you can make vows on behalf of future generations whose opinions and concerns might be very different from ours. I do agree with most of the principles in it, other than on nuclear weapons, which i never, ever want to be used, but think mutual deterrence has actually proven to work to reduce the number and scale of wars (though i’d like to see the US and the Russians reduce their nuclear arsenals to minimise the risk of an accidental launch, which seems to me like a bigger risk than anyone using them deliberately when the other side has them too)